I can't tell you how much this annoys me. I've been programming professionally for over a decade now, and I've done a lot of things: C#, PHP, PERL, Ruby, Python, Javascript, etc, etc, etc. Taking a look at my resume, you would assume a rational and logical person would say: "oh, this guy's been in it a while, he could probably pick up anything" -- but this rarely happens.
I get it, you need deep technical expertise in X framework working with Y platform. Actually, no, I don't get it because a decent developer will pick up and run with anything you hand them, regardless of what they've worked on professionally in the past.
> Care
Passion != Success.
Look, I know you're oozing passion for building Twitter for Barnyard Animals, but don't expect me to show enthusiasm for your niche. Honestly, I've probably never heard of it before now. Maybe in time I'd come to really understand it and be interested in it, but right now I'm more interested in the scaling issues and optimizing my productivity through my tools.
Everything seems to come back to that good ol' fashioned advice:
"Do what you love and the money will follow"
It's pretty cliche, but the point is that you need to actually enjoy what you're doing and worry less about the money (unless you're in love with money, in which case go get a job on Wall Street). Sure, the chance to cash out big is a huge plus, but as Mark pointed out unless you're a founder it's very unlikely.
This is most likely a contributing factor to the talent crunch in the Bay Area. No one wants to take the chance on being the #1 or #2 engineering employee since the odds are weighed heavily against you. I imagine most sane people would look at it like this:
C-level / Founder: Risky, less salary now but larger option grants. Lots of hours.
Early employee: Riskiest. Less salary and less options. More hours.
Later employee: Least risky. Salary approaching market rate. No significant options. Hours that approach a normal work week (~40).
Is there a decent resource for learning how to sell a product? Most of us can code and implement the technical parts of a business, but what we need is a Codeacademy for marketing. Something that's not run by slimy "internet marketers" or contains vague advice full of handwaving "use Google's Adwords tool lalala~"
Forget learning how to 'sell' a product. You can't just 'sell' a bad product.
WHAT YOU WANT
What you really want is to learn how to research, develop and market a product 'that sells'. To learn this, I suggest you do two things that might surprise you.
DO THIS
First, write a 2 minute infomercial script for your product. Practice being the presenter. This is a surprisingly informative exercise. Make sure to address any questions or objections people would have about the product, support or refunds in your script.
THEN DO THIS
Second, write out a one page direct response magazine advertisement for your product. Anticipate any and all questions, objections and concerns in your ad. For examples, see old-school direct response ads by Joe Sugarman for products such as the Pocket CV from the 70's.
IT"S THE PROCESS
By going through the process of writing a 2 minute infomercial script, and also writing a 1 page direct response magazine advertisement you will be forced to understand and echo features, benefits and emotional benefits and also anticipate and answer questions and objections. These are the two most valuable selling skills whether in person, online or in print.
SELLING IN PRINT
Being able to sell in print is really valuable, because your ads and advertising can scale to billions of pages.
There's a lot to know about selling, marketing and developing products that sell. I've been studying it for 10 years, and it's going to take a lifetime of learning to do my best work.
I would be glad to share some things I have learned with you. Reach out and let's connect - dan [at] tinylever [dot] com.
I think what you might actually be looking for is a course on storytelling. Ability to sell largely depends on your ability to convey a compelling, relate-able narrative. Everything else is more or less about finding ways to fit digestible pieces of that narrative into various formats (ads, blog posts, sales calls, landing pages.. whatever)
There are a bunch of resources on marketing a product. Rob Walling's book Start Small, Stay Small, is mostly about marketing and picking a market. The Micropreneur Academy (micropreneur.com) is a collection of material that greatly expands on the book, plus a private forum. They host Microconf yearly (already sold out this year). Dane Maxwell teaches similar skills in TheFoundation.io. Mixergy interviews are filled with case studies, and Mixergy Premium has dozens of courses on marketing and selling for tech startups.
Rob's book and the Micropreneur Academy is exactly what I was thinking of when I mentioned "hand waving" I've read the book twice, and subscribed for several months.
I found that their advice consisted of two things:
1) Find a niche using Google Adwords.
2) Rank #1 with SEO.
And that's about it. It's incredibly vague and frustrating, especially when most niches are oversaturated these days. I reached out to Rob about this, and he replied "yeah, it's hard to find an untapped niche". The entire premise of building a product in his materials is based around finding a nice that's underserved and that you can rank easily in Google for. Anytime someone tells me to solve marketing issues with "just use SEO", they're immediately discredited in my mind.
That being said, the rest of the book was solid. The problem I have is that there is very little actionable information on selling a product outside of Magic SEO-land, which everyone knows is a myth.
Maybe we read a different book. On page 148 of Start Small, Stay Small, traffic is broken into two quality tiers. The top shelf traffic is (1) a mailing list, (2) a blog, podcast, or video blog, and (3) organic search. Second tier includes a longer list including PPC, social media, etc. So the book itself doesn't even list SEO as the first item in the top tier.
And Rob's book is a small part of the universe of startup marketing. Mixergy has plenty of stories of businesses starting without SEO as their primary driver. One amazing case study is Sam Ovens, who was so successful at marketing first before building anything that he not only extracted money from the people he had interviewed, he took the same virtual product (not yet built) and extracted cash from new customers who hadn't been helping him design it. Then he built it. And his niche is hardly unique; there are obviously many more areas like that to mine. How did he choose a niche? He didn't do keyword research. He studied the employment ads and looked into business categories that were hiring a lot, to see if he could help them automate with software:
Has anyone offered to pay for your niche product before you build it? That would be a nice filter to see if you are building something people want.
The cruel reality is that building the product should occupy about 15% of your effort. The sales and marketing, including idea extraction, market research, etc., will be 85% of the work. There is an ocean of marketing tactics and information out there, and it is a lot more detailed than your two step summary above. Sometimes marketing gurus want to reach a broad audience, and they package up a ton of their best information into a regular book. Perry Marshall did it with his Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords (much, much more than an Adwords book). And you can buy the Kindle version for the low, low price of only $3.99, which is an incredible price/performance.
The problem that we all face, especially when we're new is that of discovery. Until you reach a certain level of notoreity online, creating your own little sandbox doesn't make sense. I could create a little programming blog, host it myself and revel in the twelve hits per day, or start a coderwall account and start showing up in targeted searches right away. Is Coderwall taking advantage of me in order to sell job listings? No, there's an equal trade of exposure - at least to start.
Working Remotely != Working from home. Often when I'm working remotely, I'm either in a coffee shop or a co-working location, vary rarely at home. I don't like driving, so being able to control when and where I drive is huge.
The big issue is that of being able to control my own environment. If it's too hot, I can work someplace where it's not, same if it's too loud. When you require everyone to work in one shared area, this control disappears and you're often left to the whims of either the weak common denominator, the highest paid person, or the loudest (ie the small thin woman that keeps the office incredibly hot)
If you want dedicated employees, don't run a shitty company.
Are unpaid internships something that's uniquely common in NYC? I scan Craigslist all the time for freelance opportunities and almost every single unpaid gig in New York is touted as an "internship". I have never seen this in listings in Dallas or Austin. Internships are incredibly murky things. You cannot, legally, get free labor from someone for the sole benefit of the business. The DoE has cracked down on this type of thing before. One would assume that in a strong liberal city like NYC, this sort of nonsense wouldn't happen often.
You have to remember that while liberal, NYC is at its core a business focused city that has a long history (for US standards at least) in business.
With that in mind "internships" i.e. unpaid labor for the inexperienced is almost expected proving ground for the up and comers.
In reality, the "best" internships can go unpaid because their target market is students from top universities who come from affluent backgrounds whose parents could easily afford an apartment in NYC over the Summer.
That being said, I'm being general here. A lot of startups pay (and should pay) for programmers. Actually, us programmers have it pretty good. Try to a paid business internship in NYC sometime.
If you're in "real" business not a creative industry like Fashion, Music, or Publishing you can get paid professional level salaries, for instance Investment banking interns get paid get paid a few thousand a month.
Don't forget the author's own confirmation bias; the author is in an industry that relies on unpaid internships, and probably has many friends, who are also in unpaid internships in related fields (i.e. fashion, non-profit, etc).
The reason I'm upset, is that it sets a precedent for other companies: "Oh, look at Yahoo not allowing remote employees, maybe we shouldn't either" which sets our industry back 10 years.
The author of the piece, Penelope Trunk, has a well-established pattern: write a highly flammable headline followed by a long, off-the-cuff piece intended to grab attention and generate page views via controversy de jour.
The article does not even broach any of the important issues being discussed around telecommuting: trust, productivity, team gelling, etc. But instead takes advantage of a recent controversy and adds a little spin from Trunk's tired routine in order to generate page views and comments.
She once wrote that travelling is a waste of time (for her, but she projects it to everyone). After reading this a few years ago, I actively started to dislike this person immediately.
Let's discuss the actual message of the post. Two paragraphs in I'm already in full rage mode. Giving up your life for a company is ok? I understand dedication, even the occasional extra few hours, but what Mrs. Trunk is proposing is literally living at work, which we all know is unmaintainable and unhealthy for most of us. Research has shown that there is a tiny portion of the population that can get 4 hours a sleep and maintain 16 hour days, but that's only about 1% of us. The rest of us have bodies and lives to maintain.
Full stack developer: Node, PHP, Ruby/Rails, SQL and MongoDB
Mobile: iOS
I'm a super-generalist. I've done everything from developing for obscure ERP systems, to social networking sites, to mobile devices. Recently I've been pulled into the Node.js world where I've been designing data services and web services with Express and Restify on top of MongoDB.
I have immediate availability for most small projects. We can discuss longer-term engagements if needed.
This is more of the ever-popular "eat the rich" sentiment. Frankly, until someone can show that:
a) she doesn't have a daughter, or sons for the matter.
and
b) she pockets the money instead of spending on her daughter's hobby
there is no fraud. Basically if the mother wasn't worth north of a million no one would have batted an eye at this.